


A Study on Mortification in Three Parts

by buttercups3



Series: Being Miles [2]
Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: Brief Torture, Brief but graphic violence, Discussion of Rape, F/M, Gen, LJ 60 prompts in 60 days, Language, combat trauma, oblique reference to masturbation, prompt fill: mortification
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-30
Updated: 2013-07-30
Packaged: 2017-12-21 22:30:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/905706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buttercups3/pseuds/buttercups3
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What mortification means to Miles based on its three dictionary definitions. Involves snippets of Miles lusting after Rachel, his experiences as a POW in Afghanistan (my canon), and his leadership as general of the Monroe Republic. The origins of Dark!Miles based on the LJ 60 prompts in 60 days: mortification.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Study on Mortification in Three Parts

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: I went back and forth about whether to rate this M or E. It's rather disturbing and might set off rape/torture triggers, so please do avoid in that case; however, the rape is threatened (it doesn't actually occur though Miles almost justifies it to himself) and the torture is very briefly described. The masturbation is likewise pretty oblique.

Charlie doesn’t think Miles is a monster, but that’s because her goodness is such that she can’t even imagine the things Miles has seen and done and been. He likes her this way – wants to keep her on a shelf – a delicate porcelain doll with gardenia-white skin blushed just at the cheeks. Long, fine blonde hair like her mother’s – her mother who fell off the shelf long ago. Miles doesn’t like to think that the women he loves have any of the same cracks as him.

* * *

Charlie doesn’t, for instance, know how long and how much Miles lusted after her mother.

**_Mortification: 1. the subjection and denial of bodily passions and appetites by abstinence or self-inflicted pain or discomfort_ **

Miles tries to pretend he’s not listening, but he can hear them: Rachel and Ben. It’s Christmas, and he’s not on tour, so he’s got nowhere else to be. And this is the last space he’d choose to inhabit – their little Barbie’s dream house (or Barbie’s duplex – hey, it’s Chicago and real estate is tight). The walls are thin, and Miles can hear the _thwap_ , _thwap_ , _thwaping_ of the bed against the wall – no headboard, because who can afford those things? Miles rolls over in bed, pelvis into palm, burying his face, smashing his nose against cotton, and wishing swiftly for suffocation.

Miles tries to imagine it being him instead of Ben, but fuck it, it’s not fair to Ben. Rachel and Ben are married, and married people fuck. Miles grinds into his hand a few times and gives up, because he’s too damn sad to masturbate. He would go on tour in Iraq a thousand times to avoid the post-nuclear-level disarray of his personal life.

Miles doesn’t even remember the last time he was with a woman. Bass is so much better at keeping up appearances of being human – fucking women they meet in bars, shooting the shit with stewardesses, waitresses. Miles looks at them and imagines big gaping holes in their heads from errant rifle fire or stumpy limbs where an IED lopped of their means of locomotion. What the hell is wrong with Miles these days? The military says it’s repeated head trauma that makes Marines loopy, so he’ll just chalk it up to that. Better than being crazy.

This time Miles tries making a fist and grinding ruthlessly against it, willing himself to feel pleasure, arousal, something, because he can’t be this dead inside, Goddammit, he’s only twenty-fucking-four. Is there anything more pathetically soul-withering than unrequited love?

No, Charlie doesn’t know how long Miles wanted Rachel, or how sick Miles felt when his sweatiest, most private desire actually became flesh, betraying his big brother – the one who picked up the sobbing toddler Miles when he dropped his ice cream cone and bought him another. The one with the rainbow sprinkles no less. Sometimes mortification is good.

* * *

Charlie also doesn’t know how Miles was reduced to a puddle of weeping, writhing filth in an Afghan prison, where he gave up every military secret he could think of and then some just to die – to end the torture – and then didn’t die. Only lived to remember.

**_Mortification: 2. necrosis, gangrene_ **

Miles has been a POW in a Afghanistan for one hour, for two weeks, for his whole life. What does it matter? If he’s ever lived elsewhere, those memories are dying. The actual time he is incarcerated (he’ll later learn) is three months, three weeks, five days, and eleven hours. At that mystical point in the future, Miles will be pulled out of the putrid cell naked, carbuncular, indistinguishable from dirt and his own feces by Bass; his swearing, pock-marked Lt. Rupert Johnson; and sundry other Marines from Miles’s squad. By then, they’ll have tried seven times to extract Miles, and only their balls-out courage and Marine-engrained tenacity would allow Miles to live to learn exactly how long he was locked underground. The agony in Bass’s watery blue eyes would explain to Miles that there is more than one way of being tortured. Being dunked in water and pissed on and gun-raped over and over is one thing; your best friend imagining you like that while he can’t get to you is another. Who’s to say which is worse? Miles is glad it was him who was captured, because he’d never wish this on anyone.

Miles’s head rolls against the unyielding clay wall, and he rips open his eyelids. Dried discharge has nearly sown them together, whether from tears or just hideous lack of hygiene. Miles has certainly been weeping. He would have thought himself stronger than that, but when they dragged him by his hair across the concrete, his legs catching on errant nails and debris, his eyes leaked. And when they yanked down his pants, screaming in his bleeding eardrums that he was a cock-sucking American turd, and tried to fit the barrel of a rifle in him, his eyes leaked again.

Miles shifts so that he is on all fours, hoping it will bring some relief to the deep ache he almost can’t bear. He’s not alone in this cell – hasn’t been from the beginning – and can smell the NATO soldier rotting next to him. The poor sack is German (“Hans,” he’d introduced himself) and doesn’t speak much English. He sustained some pretty substantial wounds to his feet, and they’ve gone black and flaky: gangrenous, Miles supposes, though it’s his first experience with it.

Miles crouches like a panting dog and allows his eyes to blur and shut again. He’s wrenched to the surface again by his companion.

Hans requests “Section, section!”

Miles looks at him, trying to figure what this could possibly mean. Hans is pulling on the arm of Miles’s mud-caked fatigues in desperation, blubbering the word over and over. Hans points at the bubbling, decaying mass of flesh that used to be shaped as legs. Miles shrugs at Hans, forcing himself to sit on his sore ass and make sense of the man’s urgent gibberish.

It hits Miles like an anvil in one of those stupid cartoons. Miles says, “I’m not cutting off your legs.”

Hans: “Please! Please!”

“What would I use anyway?” Miles’s voice sounds like gravel being dragged across a rock garden. He’s so damn thirsty. This should go down in history as the worst conversation two men have ever had, but Miles isn’t naïve enough to believe that.

“Rip. Rip!” Hans is preposterously gesturing how Miles might use his bare hands to rend the offending legs from their weary sockets.

“Jesus, man. Jesus,” Miles objects. He drags himself away from Hans’s grasp just to emphasize his refusal.

Hans howls and howls for so many hours that eventually Miles breaks down and cries too. Then the guards come in. They kick Miles in the side just for fun. They drag away Hans and probably chop him up into little bits, but Miles never knows, because he’s gone forever.

Sometimes mortification is bad.

* * *

Charlie doesn’t know how Miles felt when he first crossed the line – you know, _that_ one, the one that separates the hard-hearted slaughterers from the do-no-harmers unless its absolutely necessary – as Militia general, because Miles wasn’t smart enough to figure something else out at the time. And when Rachel later called him out on it, narrated it to his fucking face, it only made it intractable.

**_Mortification: 3. a sense of humiliation and shame caused by something that wounds one's pride or self-respect_ **

“What’s the problem, Jeremy?” Miles and Bass are watching a company of Militiamen construct earthworks. Texas has been threatening an invasion, and they’re shoring up defenses. Both of them are chewing on sunflower seeds and spitting out the dry carcasses.

“The women of Cincinnati are dumping their slop pots on our boys’ heads.” Jeremy looks haggard. He hasn’t slept since they'd occupied the city.

“They’re…what?” Miles thinks his ears might not be working. He _knows_ Jeremy hasn’t slept, because he hasn’t slept either.

“Dumping shit. On our Militia,” Jeremy emphasizes as if he’s speaking to the elderly through a bullhorn. “The citizens resent the occupation. Though it’s for their own damn good,” Jeremy mumbles grumpily. “See how they like it when the Texas Rangers ride in and ransack the Queen City.”

Bass and Miles exchange a look of awe and barely restrained hilarity. Somewhere inside there still lurks eight-year-old boys, who love a good poop joke. They’ve got to hand it to the ladies of Cincinnati for their creativity.

“So…” Bass appears unsure of what to say. He looks at Miles again and spits a shell.

Jeremy is clearly growing impatient with their inertia. “Our men aren’t happy. They’ve been threatening the women with…you know.”

Miles feels dumb, because he doesn’t know. Bass seems to though. He’s running his fingers through his curls and spitting shells like a machine gun.

Miles shrugs at Jeremy, who appears to have predicted Miles’s impending ignorance, because he’s already opening his mouth to follow up.

“They’re threatening to use the penis instead of the sword, Miles.”

Miles’s lip twitches. Rape. It’s an age-old method of subjugation. Not one he’d choose, but is he beneath anything nowadays? Maybe the threat of rape (not actual, err, penetration) could serve some purpose here. Keep the women out of prison – since his first impulse is to lock them up – or keep them from being stabbed by bayonets – since that’s what his angry soldiers might resort to.

Miles finally speaks, “Well, the men aren’t allowed to rape or pillage. They know that. I’ll court martial their asses faster than…” an appropriate simile escapes him, but Bass chimes in:

“Miles can fart out his afternoon beans.” Bass claps Miles’s shoulder cheerfully. The joke was a stretch, Bass’s accompanying self-conscious shrug seems to admit.

Miles glares briefly. “But maybe the _threat_ will keep them in line. I doubt Cincinnati wants a fresh load of bastard children on its hands.”

“Jesus, Miles.” This is too much for Bass.

“Well, true or not true?” Miles prompts.

“No wonder Kelly Foster thinks we’re thugs.” Bass pulls at a straggling golden curl. He's already acquiesed, Miles senses.

Jeremy looks at Miles. “Well, the United States army used the same method during the Civil War in New Orleans. So where there’s a patriotic precedent…” Jeremy appears unwilling to follow the sentence to its macabre conclusion.

*

_Rachel and Miles are in his tent, his hands on her thighs, Miles promising her things are going to get very bad for her if she doesn’t dish on Ben’s whereabouts._

_“What’s the worst you can do to me, Miles? Rape me? Like you let your soldiers rape all of those women in Cincinnati?”_

_That was just rhetoric, Miles thinks but can’t say. He can’t afford to have Rachel, The Prisoner, know she has any power. She has to believe he’d do anything to her – that she’s nothing but his instrument._

_“It’s not rape if you want it, Rachel,” Miles snarls, instantly revolted by himself. But Rachel just laughs at him._

_“You sad, sick fuck. You’re humanity at it’s worst.”_

*

It happens to him when he’s riding in downtown Cincinnati, and his horse is so startled she almost throws him. There he is, dripping with liquid feces, hanging by a stirrup. He is able to extract his foot in time to stumble upright and hold the bridle. “Easy, girl,” he says to his mare, Zeppelin.

He looks up to meet the steely eyes of the woman who’s targeted him with her chamber pot. “Yeah! And fuck you, too, General! Rot in hell!” She chortles like a banshee, and Miles fights the urge to break down her door and crush her skull to dust in his fingers. And yeah, he thinks about humiliating her back. He understands all of a sudden why the men were threatening rape, of all things.

He’s burning with shame, with the worst kind of self-loathing. Because God…he deserves this. The Militiamen in the street are staring, and he’s got to make some sort of decision. Throw her in jail? Have her shot like he would one of his men if one dared stepped that far out of line? Christ, everybody’s looking. Everybody’s waiting.

Sometimes mortification just is.

* * *

Charlie’s not as innocent as Miles would like to keep her. He knows that. But she couldn’t possibly know what the word _monster_ means until she’s cracked open Miles’s ribcage and gazed at the murky soul beneath. Some people are selected to endure the trash of humanity – to take it on, to make it, to dish it out – and others are meant for better things.


End file.
